Every month or so, for the past few years, a new dire story has warned of how American children, from elementary school to college age, can no longer read. And every time I read one of these stories, I find myself conflicted.

On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud.

On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though?

I don’t think I’m alone in this confusion. Similar responses emerge almost every time a new piece arrives with tales of elite college students who can’t get through Pride and Prejudice or another report reveals just how far reading scores have plunged among America’s schoolchildren. “Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively,” Slate reported bleakly in 2024. Within days, a teacher’s blog offered a rebuttal, arguing that there has never been an era where adults were impressed by kids’ reading habits: “Find a news article published since the 1940s that shows that students not only read proficiently but eagerly and a lot. I’ll wait.”

On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though?

“We’ve long seen both of those extremes,” says Elena Forzani, director of the literacy education and reading education programs at Boston University. “In a sense, you could argue both are true or neither are true.”

Much of the current anxiety is being driven by the fear that new technologies are scrambling kids’ brains in a way no other generation has faced: smartphones, social media, and now the threat of generative AI, which millions of students are currently using to do their schoolwork. How could such powerful tools not change our children’s ability to process information? Yet on the other hand, there are all those think pieces about how adults had similar worries with every new piece of era-shifting technology that came before, including television.

Broadly speaking, there are two different issues that get intertwined together in the “kids can’t read” narrative. The first is the sense from professors that their students are unprepared to read at the level college requires — that while they’re technically literate, they are not sophisticated readers. The second is that at the elementary level, kids’ reading test scores are going down.

So is it true? How much panic over kids’ literacy is warranted? Scholars who study the subject, concerned English professors, and experts in the “kids these days” phenomenon told me that the literacy landscape is a lot more nuanced than either of my gut impulses would have led me to believe.

A brief history of adults saying, “Kids these days!”

When I say that every generation complains about the kids these days, I do mean all of them. We have documentation of this phenomenon going back to Socrates.

“It’s one of these things you keep seeing generation after generation,” says John Protzko, a psychology researcher at Central Connecticut State University and the co-author of the 2019 study “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking.”

Protzko’s study found that adults tend to judge kids by their own adult standards. If you’re an adult who likes to read, he says, you tend to assume that you read just as diligently as a child.

“And then I impose that on society at large: ‘Everyone liked to read as a kid,’” Protzo explains. Rapidly, that false belief can turn into “None of the kids today read like they did in my day.”

When I say that every generation complains about the kids these days, I do mean all of them. We have documentation of this phenomenon going back to Socrates.

We’re particularly prone to this kind of false memory when it comes to the attributes on which we pride ourselves. If, for instance, we are proud of being polite, conscientious adults, we feel that children are growing........

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